


Dean Winchester’s 12-Step Guide to Inebriated Online Retail Therapy for Fallen Angels and Judgemental Brothers With Bad Hair (Suck It, Sammy)

by justholdingstill (justholdstill)



Series: Dean Winchester’s 12-Step Guide to Inebriated Online Retail Therapy [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Blowjobs, Crack, Dean Winchester Makes Bad Decisions, Dean's cowboy fetish, Drunkenness, Fluff and Crack, Human Castiel (Supernatural), Idiots in Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Online Shopping, Questionable Physics, Resolved Sexual Tension, Series, everything is AU-tiful and nothing hurts, gross misuse of a cardboard cut-out, with apologies to John Wayne I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 15:25:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19748509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdingstill
Summary: Alternatively titledDean Wayne: The Life & LegendDean gets drunk. Dean orders things online. Hilarity ensues.





	Dean Winchester’s 12-Step Guide to Inebriated Online Retail Therapy for Fallen Angels and Judgemental Brothers With Bad Hair (Suck It, Sammy)

In Dean’s defense: he didn’t mean to do it.

In Dean’s defense: the website was having a sale with _free shipping_ , and his total with taxes only came to $59.99

Dean’s always liked a deal.

In Dean’s defense: He looks really fucking good in that serape, okay.

In Dean’s defense: He wasn’t even _home_ when it arrived, so that’s gotta relieve him of at least some of the culpability for his poor decision-making skills, right?

Right.

In Dean’s defense: he’d already had a long and inspired evening socializing with his very good friends Jack Daniels and Jim Beam, and he doesn’t remember a single damn thing, no matter what Sam has to say on the matter.

In any case, blackout drunk though he may have been at the time, as Cas earnestly relays the whole scenario to him later, Dean can see it all a little too well. Cas practically lives on the couch these days, his body becoming one with the chintz, essentially hooked up to Netflix by an IV drip, so Dean can easily picture the ridiculous pillow creases striping his face when he’d answered the door for the UPS delivery dude. Cas only takes off those old sweatpants of Dean’s to wash them and to shower (he hopes), so it’s not too hard to imagine the way his knee had poked through the hole in them as he bent to heft the box in his arms, unreasonably tanned and muscular for someone who lives underground and who had inhaled both seasons of _The OA_ basically without stopping.

Cas had cut himself on the blade of the scissors he’d used to open the package; Dean doesn’t so much need to imagine that as he does to stare at the layers of bacon-printed bandaids Cas has layered around his wound with no small amount of guilt, and offer to re-wrap it pretty much as soon as he’s dumped his duffel bag on the floor, but Cas just rolls his eyes. Cas had unpacked and set the thing up all by himself, and Dean doesn’t need to imagine that either, because it’s right there in front of him, all six-and-a-half dumbass cardboard feet of a truly regrettable alcohol-fueled impulse.

“Opening other people’s mail is a _federal crime_ , Cas,” Dean grumbles, mostly to distract both himself and Sam from the fact that Cas has poured the cut-out its own cup of coffee.

“Living in the United States of America without valid identification or citizenship and a criminal record is also a federal crime, _Dean_ ,” Cas says placidly, and if the way he raises that single eyebrow didn’t have a history of turning Dean’s insides to a quivering jelly, Dean might think about punching that smug hint of smirk right off of his face.

“I’ll tell you what’s a crime,” says Sam, shoving another fistful of Baked Carrot Crisps into his mouth. “Are those _chaps_ , Dean?”

In fact they are, and okay, _maybe_ they’re the ones he made the snap decision to fork over the extra cash for the rhinestone detailing on after a particularly good night at a poker table in Reno. And okay, _maybe_ the fringe on the sides was a little bit over the top, so sue him, but - “hey look, it says here there this thing came with a special gift with purchase. I didn’t realize, but it’s a big steaming pile of _shut the hell up right now Sam Winchester._ ”

In Dean’s defense: he is at least wearing jeans underneath them in the photo he uploaded, and he’s thankful for even the smallest of mercies at this point.

“Dude.” Sam puts his hands up, palms out in self defense. “You know if I had been the one to drunk-order a life-size cardboard cut-out of myself in this, um, this…outfit….and then forget about it, you know you’d never in a million years let me live it down.” He shakes his head and waves one of his hands in the direction of Dean’s two-dimensional doppleganger. “This is, like. I always knew you had the weird cowboy fetish, but man. This is on another level.”

“I kind of like it,” Cas volunteers, the words garbled around his too-big mouthful of pancakes. He swallows. “Although I will admit he’s not the breakfast conversationalist I had hoped for.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean mumbles, shoving his hands so deep into his pockets that his fingertips brush the remaining crumbs of his dignity. “You fuckin’ would, Cas.”

He doesn’t wait to see, but he feels, as he turns and slinks hurriedly down to the hall to his room, that perhaps his insult didn’t land with exactly any of the venom or accuracy he’d flung it with.

The thing is, Dean’s instinct to flee doesn’t really serve him as well as he’d hoped, either. Sam and Cas use the opportunity to christen the hard proof of Dean’s shame “Dean Wayne” in the meantime, and when Dean creeps back out of his room hours later, Sam’s nowhere to be seen, and Cas is face-down snoring in front of the TV again. Dean Wayne is carefully propped against the opposite side of the couch wearing a beauty-pageant style ribbon that proclaims his new name in nearly illegible sharpie, a pair of familiar boxers on his head. There may or may not be an empty bottle of Cuervo on the floor at his feet. There may or may not be a pair of sticky shot glasses on the table.

Dean sighs. “All right, pardner,” he says, “you’re comin’ with me.”

The thing is, Dean can’t bring himself to burn it, and what follows next is nobody’s fault but his own.

The thing is, he hides it.

He hides it well, and he’s talking sub-basement, sub-dungeon, behind-the-cursed-artifacts, under-an-invisibility-cloak kinda well. Cas isn’t really an angel anymore, and okay, so maybe Sam’s also had a whole lifetime’s worth of practice tracking down creepy, secret, hidden things, but _Dean was still born first_ , damn it. It should be safe, right?

Right.

The thing is: it keeps showing up.

In the weeks that follow, Dean Wayne shows up:

\- Behind Dean’s shower curtain

\- In the passenger seat of the Impala

\- In his closet

\- On the bottom shelf of the pantry

\- In the armory

\- In the dungeon (wrapped not only in chains, but in a pink feather boa)

\- Behind the laundry room door

\- Under his bed

\- _In_ his bed

\- Mysteriously, in an open grave on a case

\- Less mysteriously, _in Dean’s bed on a case_

In the weeks that follow, Dean learns that he and Cas may have _a more profound bond_ , whatever that means, but that Sam and Cas together have a profound, unseen capacity for asshole-ish wizardry and mischief that would make him proud under any other circumstances.

Dean learns that his reflexes are only cat-like in the sense that he’s great at fumbling glasses of water off tables. Great at puffing up like a disgruntled pigeon when he’s surprised.

Dean learns that he can scream in high C.

When Cas asks him if he’s ever considered studying the operatic arts with wide blue eyes and an entirely deadpan expression, Dean learns, not for the first time, that not only is Cas an impossibly quick study, but that he’s probably also a lot more adept at this whole business of human-ing than he lets on when he’s asked to wash the dishes.

And that’s almost the kicker.

Almost.

But no.

The thing is, Dean’s got a new .45. She’s shiny and she’s smooth and she feels cool and solid in his hands in a way that makes his trigger finger tingle pleasantly. It’s Sunday morning, early still. It’s quiet. His belly is full of bacon and scrambled eggs and the good coffee, and the only thing left to do is to take her down to the range and find out just how compatible they are the old-fashioned way.

He’s expecting to make some holes in things. He’s expecting to blow off some steam.

He’s _not_ expecting Dean Wayne set up 15 yards back from the firing line, his hat and his sheriff’s badge and his groin full of lead.

The hits are numerous, impeccably clean. They’re crisp. They’re precise.

They’re deliberate.

Dean fills his lungs and bellows out, “CAS! SAM! Get your asses down here now!”

To their credit, his roommates are capable of putting on a pretty good hustle when they need to, and Dean learns shortly thereafter that Cas has recently acquired the good human manners to _blush_ when faced with evidence of his misdeeds.

“I thought you were _hurt_ when you shouted like that, Dean,” Cas gasps, clutching at the stitch in his side.

“I _am hurt_ ,” Dean fires back. “I mean, guys…what is this? Yeah, yeah, _Dean’s a moron ha ha ha_ , but don’t you think this thing has gone far enough?”

“It’s just a joke, Dean,” Cas tries.

“You _shot_ me,” is what he gets back. Dean does a great vocal impression of someone who’s been mortally wounded in his feelings-place by the very idea of his friend and brother mutilating him in effigy, he’s just now finding out. He wonders when they’ll get around to handing out his Oscar.

“Cas is still great with a blade, but you know he needs to practice handling firearms, Dean. You said it yourself.” Dean taught Sam that poker face himself, too, right about the same time he taught the stringy little shit to walk, but even so it wavers under the strength of his scowl. “I wasn’t under the impression that you cared so much.”

His eyebrows hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his hairline, Dean scoff and looks away. “Doesn’t seem like he really needs the practice after all, from the looks of it.”

"Aw come on, dude, I really think it’s time you grew a sense of humour about this whole thing.” Sam shuffles his feet, scratches his ear, clears his throat. The puppy eyes are coming next, Dean knows, once Sam realizes that he’s semi-serious, and he can almost see the _Dean look I’m sorry_ forming on his brother’s lips just before Sam’s phone goes _DING!_ in his pocket and he sags visibly with relief.

“Woop, that’s Eileen,” Sam announces, giving Dean his brightest, most apologetic _I’ll make it up to you later_ grin, with not even enough peripheral shame in it to even pretend to take it out and look at the text, “…later, suckers.”

Cas watches Sam go with an air of aggrieved bemusement; Dean watches the way Cas flushes all the way down to the neckline of the Captain America t-shirt that Dean definitely didn’t buy for him just because he begged for it like a little kid in Wal-Mart. He’s still wearing those fucking holey sweatpants, and the sight of them softens something in Dean, so that when Cas sighs and shrugs and starts trailing off after Sam, still refusing to meet Dean’s eyes, Dean finds it in himself to reach out and touch his shoulder before he gets too far. He says, “Cas, wait.”

He’s only like a quarter serious when he fixes Cas with a little smirk and says, “why did you need to practice _shooting me in the junk_ , man? I though we were friends.”

Despite himself, Cas smiles back.

“We are friends, Dean,” Cas replies patiently, in a fondly exasperated tone that Dean has come to recognize as the one that means _thank goodness you are so pretty, Dean Winchester._ “I didn’t want to ruin his face, of course,” he adds after a moment, thoughtful, in the tone that means _duh_ , and while Dean’s busy trying to control his own blush and gulping for the oxygen that suddenly seems to have gone conspicuously absent from the bunker’s atmosphere, he just pats Dean gently on the shoulder in return and tells him, “excuse me. I think I need to go check on my cookies before they burn.”

Still, in the evening, when Dean goes back to look, Dean Wayne is gone from the gun range, and that’s the end of that.

But that’s not the kicker either.

The thing is: Dean’s been wholly, hopelessly, stupidly in love with Castiel for about as long as he can remember. A few lifetimes past normal, and a few deaths too, it’s a simple fact of his existence now, the same as the permanent squeak Baby’s developed in her suspension. The same as Sam’s annoyingly constant, unwavering loyalty and commitment to vegetables, the same as the sharp ache in Dean’s back that he wakes up with for days after even an average hunt now, the same as the exquisite ache that blooms in his chest when he watches Cas kneel in the dirt outside and coax flowers from the earth using nothing but time and the power of his bare human hands.

The sun rises and the sun sets, and Cas gets through _Jane the Virgin_ and _Friends_ and _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ ; he weeps in Dean’s arms over the first ten minutes of _Up_ so deeply that he actually turns the TV off and goes to sleep in his own bed for a whole day and a night after that. Cas’ cookies turn into more sophisticated fruit pies, and later on he develops a minor obsession with focaccia, and one day he actually drives into town and gets a haircut that isn’t from Dean or from Sam and buys a set of cake pans complete with a piping bag before he comes home, and Dean just fucking loves him, as easy and as natural as breathing.

He thinks maybe he’s supposed to be surprised the first time he says this out loud – just to himself, in the bathroom mirror, his toothbrush hanging out the corner of his mouth.

He thinks maybe he’s supposed to be surprised the night that Cas tells them that he needs a ride into town, and Sam agrees to do it but then performs his ultra-mystical total disappearing act five minutes before go time, and Dean finds himself wrangling his knees under the checkered tabletop of the best (and granted, only) little Italian restaurant in Cawker City while Cas sits across from him with a slightly wild glint in his eye and tells Dean that he’s never _been on a date before._

With air quotes.

He thinks maybe he’s supposed to be surprised two nights later, when Cas pauses _Russian Doll_ just long enough to get Dean’s attention by whipping the remote across the room and pulls him in, bodily, by the front of his shirts, to kiss the living daylights out of him.

Dean thinks he might be a little surprised when Cas just chucks the whole _Brand New Human, Take It Slow_ routine right out the proverbial window and gets his hand down the front of Dean’s pants without preamble, but he rolls with it – Dean rolls with it off the couch, through the kitchen, all the way down the hall, and straight into Cas’ sheets. Cas refuses to take his mouth away from Dean’s for pretty much anything except the five second courtesy of closing his bedroom door, and Dean rolls with that too. He’s easy, so sue him, but he’s not a complete animal.

Cas gets Dean’s jeans down to his knees and starts blowing him like he’s trying to set the land speed record for fellatio right around the time Dean notices exactly what – or should he say, _who_ – is taped carefully to the back of said door, bullet holes and all, so thereafter Dean will never really be sure whether the noise that bursts out of him is a groan of pleasure or a yelp of laughter.

All things considered, he supposes, it doesn’t really matter, because the end result is the same.

Dean is definitely surprised.

“I told you that I liked him,” Cas shrugs, and kisses the tip of Dean’s dick tenderly, as if he weren’t just trying to swallow it whole.

In Dean’s defense: if one of the sweet post-coital nothings Dean whispers in his ear just so happens to be something along the lines of _you’re a fuckin’ weirdo, Castiel_ , then there’s nobody there to hear it but him and Cas and Dean Wayne, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> Long story short, one time my partner's buddy ordered a cardboard cutout of himself while he was wasted, and had no idea until it showed up at his house while he was out of town and his girlfriend opened it. I told this story to our Discord group, suggested that Dean might do something similar, and we were off to the crack races. :p
> 
> special shoutout to the Salt n' Burnaby crew for inspiring this pile of nonsense and letting me birth it live and in living colour, with a wink and a tip of the hat to our dear [Gem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavensCAT) for suggesting Dean Wayne might get used for target practice!
> 
> If you caught the pie/focaccia reference, then obviously you know that [Pie Without Plot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/914821/chapters/1774579) belongs to the inimitable [MajorEnglishEsquire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajorEnglishEsquire/pseuds/MajorEnglishEsquire) and [orange_crushed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed) \- if you _didn't_ , then please go immerse yourself in the wonderful feel-good beauty that is their seminal contribution to this fandom, and also read everything else they've ever written while you're there because they're both fucking amazing writers. Okay? Okay. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/justholdingstill). You can find the rebloggable tumblr post [here](https://justholdingstill.tumblr.com/post/186177388402/dean-winchesters-12-step-guide-to-inebriated)
> 
> Kudos, comments, and new friends are always welcome. :)


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